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Been using xbmc since it was xbmp on the old xbox - I love my htpcs and honestly think xbmc is far and away the best media centre solution about, oss or proprietary.

I've been running openelec for the past year or so, it's a great system. Exactly what I want for a htpc-only machine - A Stripped down, essentials only, LFS-style embedded system.

I'm a little confused though... "Turn any pc into a media machine in less than 15 minutes" ?? Assuming I've already got the 80MB ish release downloaded onto a desktop, I can have openelec transferred to a USB stick, installed to a mechanical disk and booted into xbmc on the same/another system in about 60seconds...

The upgrade system is fantastic, the sabnzbd addon suite is great and for a simpleton user like me it's nice to be able to actually have a 2 way communication with the devs.

It's sad, but these are by far my favourite oss projects, something I actually like (and get excited by) checking progress on a daily basis.

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OpenELEC 1.0 is using XBMC 10.1 Dharma and ships on the Linux 3.1-rc10 kernel pre-release.

I like XBMC but why go with Dharma? Dharma is a CPU hog. It burns more CPU cycles when idle displaying the interface than when rendering video! In pre-Eden builds they've fixed this with dirty regions tracking, and it also has a much better interface now.

At least proprietary drivers are available for those who want them, which for a media center / HTPC is really the only viable choice at the moment: the binary AMD / NVIDIA drivers have proper power management support and hardware video acceleration on their respective video engines and exposed via XvBA / VDPAU

What I gathered is that NVidia ION systems are the preferred choice for XBMC. Still too many people having problems with AMD proprietary drivers...

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I like XBMC but why go with Dharma? Dharma is a CPU hog. It burns more CPU cycles when idle displaying the interface than when rendering video! In pre-Eden builds they've fixed this with dirty regions tracking, and it also has a much better interface now.

What I gathered is that NVidia ION systems are the preferred choice for XBMC. Still too many people having problems with AMD proprietary drivers...

Because Dharma is the current stable version? As far as I know, there's a few eden patches backported too - obviously not the dirty region GUI stuff though. There's always been development builds for eden available at http://sources.openelec.tv/tmp/image/openelec-eden/ if that's what you want to run (which is what I'm running on 2 of my systems)

The nvidia (doesn't have to be ION obviously though)/AMD thing is no different than any project/software/etc though.... This is linux remember! Simply put, VDPAU has been rock solid for as long as I can remember, hardware acceleration with ATI has been less fun....
Saying that, I've got a zotac ad10 (amd fusion e350 based mini pc) running an openelec eden build and it works brilliantly - I've only had (macroblocks) trouble with one file.

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Because Dharma is the current stable version? As far as I know, there's a few eden patches backported too - obviously not the dirty region GUI stuff though. There's always been development builds for eden available at http://sources.openelec.tv/tmp/image/openelec-eden/ if that's what you want to run (which is what I'm running on 2 of my systems)

The nvidia (doesn't have to be ION obviously though)/AMD thing is no different than any project/software/etc though.... This is linux remember!
Saying that, I've got a zotac ad10 (amd fusion e350 based mini pc) running an openelec eden build and it works brilliantly - I've only had (macroblocks) trouble with one file.

It takes longer to type a question like this than it does to try it for yourself!
But... Unfortunately, there's no web browser included with openelec, xbmc or xbmc live.

Actually it's not, because I don't have a spare system to test it on. And without a webbrowser that knows flash to watch live streams it's not a full featured HTPC for me.

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M1AU, go on the website and look at all the addons and you'll see it's a great HTPC.

I use xbmc for 3 years and on linux it's IMHO the best (featured/beautiful) media center solution.
And i'm really pleased to see the official release of the Openelec distribution which, in my case, work out of the box.

I can't wait for next xbmc version which may/will integrate PVR (finally), HD audio and i'm sure so much new things.

Thanks to all the developpers (XBMC and Openelec).

Bibi

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M1AU, go on the website and look at all the addons and you'll see it's a great HTPC.

I use xbmc for 3 years and on linux it's IMHO the best (featured/beautiful) media center solution.
And i'm really pleased to see the official release of the Openelec distribution which, in my case, work out of the box.

I can't wait for next xbmc version which may/will integrate PVR (finally), HD audio and i'm sure so much new things.

Thanks to all the developpers (XBMC and Openelec).

Bibi

Well I use it on my self made NAS Server / HTPC combo, but I haven't found a way to watch justin.tv streams within XBMC. The rest works great of course, but it's still not full featured for me.